Articles and Resources

QUOTE: Shortly after officials switched the source of their drinking water to the Flint River from Lake Huron in April 2014 to save money, residents started complaining that their tap water looked strange, tasted bad and caused rashes. But not until the fall of 2015, when the water was found to have elevated levels of lead that were reflected in children’s blood, did state officials swing into action. Now they are scrambling to address a situation that has endangered the health of Flint’s children and generated untold costs and anxiety.

QUOTE: Opponents of the bankruptcy — primarily city employee unions and retirees — have argued that Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan and his associates rammed the bankruptcy through without meeting legal requirements to bargain in good faith with creditors for an alternate solution to Detroit’s deepening crisis.

QUOTE: Detroit’s pension shortfall accounts for about $3.5 billion of the $18 billion in debts that led the city to file for bankruptcy last week....Kevyn D. Orr, the city’s emergency manager, has called for “significant cuts” to the pensions of current retirees. His plan is being fought vigorously by unions that point out that pensions are protected by Michigan’s Constitution, which calls them a contractual obligation that “shall not be diminished or impaired.”

QUOTE: The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled, 8 to 7, on Thursday that Michigan’s voter-approved 2006 ban on affirmative action was unconstitutional. The ruling, in Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action v. University of Michigan, was not based on racial discrimination, but rather on a violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. The ban, the court said, unfairly placed a special burden on supporters of race-conscious admissions policies.

QUOTE: Reuters took aim at [Chesapeake]’s flamboyant chief executive, Aubrey McClendon, in a series of articles, prompting his ouster as company chairman (he remains CEO) last month...The company was rocked anew last week when the news agency disclosed a series of email exchanges in which McClendon and other Chesapeake executives appeared to collude with officials at EnCana Corp., Canada’s largest natural gas company, to suppress the price of land leases in Michigan.

QUOTE: A divided federal appeals court on Friday struck down Michigan's controversial ban on consideration of race and gender in college admissions....The affirmative action ban was passed five years ago in a referendum and was added to the state's constitution...

QUOTE: Public defenders’ offices in at least seven states are refusing to take on new cases or have sued to limit them, citing overwhelming workloads that they say undermine the constitutional right to counsel for the poor...in the most open revolt by public defenders in memory, many of the government-appointed lawyers say that state budget cuts and rising caseloads have pushed them to the breaking point.

QUOTE: Their pickups and sport utility vehicles are not selling, and now General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler have to pay thousands of auto workers not to make them. With more than 15 of their assembly plants across the country set to be idled or slowed because of shift cutbacks, the Detroit automakers will temporarily lay off upward of 25,000 auto workers this summer and fall. Because of their union contracts, G.M., Ford and Chrysler are obligated to pay workers more than half of their regular take-home wages, plus health benefits, with state unemployment benefits picking up a portion of the rest.

QUOTE: "People wear shirts worse than this, with Guinness, Jack Daniels and Corona on them and don't get stopped," Stevenson High senior Jared Belsley told MyFOX Detroit. "To get in trouble for a shirt like this made up for spirit week is kind of absurd.

QUOTE: Two labor strikes this fall have been short, but the outcome is still tough for auto workers: After years of rising pay and benefits, the tide has turned the other way. The next generation of United Auto Workers will receive lower pay and benefits than their predecessors, judging by the contracts reached or ratified this week.

QUOTE: Supporters of a publicly owned span here say it is the only wise plan, the only one that offers needed public oversight and regulation. They have deep concerns, they say, about allowing a single man to continue his decades-long reign over such a vital connector of nations.

QUOTE: Two former police officers were awarded more than $6.5 million on Tuesday by a jury that agreed with the officers’ argument that they were discharged in retaliation for investigating misconduct by the mayor and his security detail.

QUOTE: The sting was the culmination of an investigation led by the Michigan Agriculture Dept.'s food and dairy division, which wanted to know whether Hebron had violated Michigan law by distributing raw milk (milk that isn't pasteurized or homogenized) and whether the co-op had broken the law by using a retail establishment's storage area as a milk drop-off point.

QUOTE: In North Carolina, a state judge in July ruled unconstitutional a law that states it's illegal for unmarried couples to live together...Yet the debate about whether the laws should continue to exist is a flash point between secularists and traditional Christians over the definition of a family.

QUOTE: O'Brien allegedly said later that Fieger would reveal Cox's extramarital affair unless the attorney general dropped the investigation into the television ad campaign....It remains unclear what the tangle means for the original investigation into whether Fieger broke campaign finance laws by backing an expensive campaign against Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Markman...

QUOTE: The nation's largest teachers union joined school districts in Michigan, Texas and Vermont in filing a federal lawsuit yesterday charging that the Department of Education has failed to provide adequate funding for the No Child Left Behind initiative.

QUOTE: Under pressure from Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), who oversees the budget of the Bureau of Indian Affairs ... [a] $3 million grant from a federal program intended for impoverished Indian tribal schools went to one of the richest tribes in the country.

QUOTE: ...the [drug] testing violated the Constitution because it did not fit into "the closely guarded category of constitutionally permissible suspicionless testing," which generally requires a threat to public safety.